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Speaker Series

Rethinking K-12 in the Intelligence Era: Smart Classrooms and Learning Communities

Jim Slotta, PhD.

Sept. 29, 2025
Lockwood 205 | 12:00-1:00 p.m.
Lunch will be provided

 

Jim Slotta, PhD, will review prior work on a model for collective inquiry known as KCI: Knowledge, Community and Inquiry. As a pedagogical model, KCI guides the design of curriculum units that engage the classroom as a learning community, producing a knowledge base and assessable learning outcomes that target specified learning goals.  I will also discuss recent work relating to smart classrooms for learning communities, including a flexible AI infrastructure called the SCripting and ORchestration Environment (SCORE) as well as a new authoring environment called the Intelligent Design Environment for Active Learning (IDEAL).  Together, this work supports a vision for designing and enacting powerful new forms of collective inquiry, leveraging AI in ways that bring students and teachers together as a community.  I will also discuss recent work on a project called the Critical Action Learning Exchange (CALE), which explores the creation of an inquiry curriculum that helps students form identity and gain meaning and purpose in their learning.

Bio: Jim Slotta (co- PI) is a professor and the president's chair in knowledge technologies and education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Since 2005, Dr. Slotta has led a team of students, designers and developers to investigate new models of collaborative and collective inquiry. These studies have advanced a pedagogical model known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), in which students and teachers collaborate as a learning community to engage i STEM inquiry projects. Slotta currently directs the ENCORE lab (http://encorelab.org) in which KCI curriculum and technology environments are developed and researched.  From 2006 - 2011, Slotta served as Canada Research Chair in Education and Technology, serving as PI or co-I on more than 30 funded projects and supervising 20 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers.  In 2019, Slotta launched the Critical Action Learning Exchange (CALE), where teachers develop, exchange and discuss competency-centered curriculum that empowers students as learners, providing meaning and purpose to their schooling experience and scaffolding their formation of learner and career identity. 

Virtual Reality Workshop

How are Educators Exploring and Implementing Future Technology?

Sept. 27, 2025
Capen Hall 107 | UB North Campus
10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.
Lunch will be provided

Come to the University at Buffalo to explore applications of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality as a learning tool. We’ll have some introductory lectures from experts and time for hands-on demos, plus networking over lunch

Attendees can park in the lot adjacent to the Jacobs Management Center (off Augspurger Road) and enter the Lockwood Memorial Library. Campus Map

PLEASE NOTE: SPACE IS LIMITED TO 30 PEOPLE

Featuring

Mohamed Etman, Assistant Professor, Director of the Building Environment Visualization Lab, UB School of Architecture and Planning.

Mohamed Etman, PhD
School of Architecture and Planning
University at Buffalo

Alex Fernandez Owner and Founder of VRBuffalo LLC, Immersive media and learning tools in education.

Alex Fernandez
Owner and Founder
VRBuffalo LLC

Erin Kearney, PhD Educational Linguistics; Language Teaching and Learning; Interculturality; Design of Learning Environments (VR); Teacher Preparation and Learning.

Erin Kearney, PhD
Graduate School of Education
University at Buffalo

David Pape.

David Pape, PhD
Department of Media Study
University at Buffalo

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